Im sure everyone knows about Cherry Knowle Asylumn. The Victorian hospital first opened in 1895 as The Sunderland County Lunatic Asylum. The hospital was designed to what is known as a compact arrow echelon plan, with six wards projecting out from a central area of communal spaces which included the chapel, pool and gymnasium.

Some areas within the Cherry Knowle site remain active and the hospital found itself at the centre of a media scandal in 2002 when a 29 year old patient named Kevin Knowles was found dead in his room from suffocation. An enquiry soon followed investigating the running of the hospital and 10 other death cases within the hospital were re-investigated as a result. Sadly another patient, Paul Spence also met an untimely death in the grounds only hours after having walked out of his ward. The reasons for his death even though declared as accidental still remain unclear and shrouded in unanswered questions.

Another interesting incident which took place at the hospital in February of 2007 involved psychiatric patient named Graham Burton who had been an in-patient for many years at Cherry Knowle. Burton had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and prior to his release into the community he had informed a psychiatrist of his darkest fantasies of murdering a care worker. Within less than 48 hrs of Burton’s release the body of a female care-worker had been discovered bleeding to death in the grounds of the hospital with a butcher’s knife lodged in her back. She had been stabbed repeatedly but after weeks of fighting for her life in intensive care she thankfully survived the brutal ordeal. These are but a few of some of the most dramatic fragments taken from stories and lives that have all passed through the hospital’s darkest corridors and with such a provocative history its no wonder that paranormal investigators and many locals believe Cherry Knowle to be Britain’s most haunted hospital.